Understanding Cyber Age Bullying

Professor of Psychology Robert McCormick is the founder and
director of Montclair State University’s Center for Child Advocacy, which
offers 12-hour anti-bullying training, with a focus on New Jersey’s
Anti-Bullying Law, for school personnel and others who wish to gain a deeper
understanding about bullying. Anti-bullying advocates have described the law,
enacted a year after the suicide of 18-year-old Rutgers University student
Tyler Clementi in September 2010, as the toughest in the nation.

Q: What lessons have been learned from the Ravi-Clementi
case?

A: The best thing is perhaps some consciousness-raising for
people. What’s important for students to realize is that bullying is not just
cruel, there are also legal repercussions. In this case, the people were over
18; they weren’t children. But younger kids look up to older kids, so hopefully
there’s a lesson to be learned that sometimes older kids don’t always lead us
in the right direction. Hopefully, older kids realize they can be prosecuted
for doing things like this. As horrible as these episodes are, they at least
help raise awareness. Kids are dying and that shouldn’t happen on our watch. We
need to fix this—we’re all responsible for that.

Another lesson to be learned is that we can’t assume our
definition of personal space matches someone else’s. For someone from my
generation, filming someone in a sexual situation would be beyond our
imagination. A lot of younger people probably think that way too, but others
who may not be horrible people are more desensitized to having a lack of
personal space. They might not see it as being as big a deal because they’re
used to revealing their intimate thoughts on Facebook. For others, obviously
for Tyler, it was.

Q: How does bullying today differ from a generation ago?

A: I don’t think bullying per se is different. I think what’s different is the context in
which it’s played out. Years ago, if we were bullied, we went home to the
safety of our rooms and we could shut out the bullying until the next day. Now,
bullying is relentless. It follows us with our computers; it follows us with
our cell phones; it follows us at home. There’s no safety, no place where we
can go.

It’s much more damaging, particularly for adolescents, where
shame, humiliation, embarrassment, and peer acceptance are so important. Now
you have the world knowing that you are this or that. Sometimes there are pictures,
which is even worse. The worst thing you can do is embarrass an adolescent. And
then there’s Facebook. Let’s say I have 150 friends and I send something to someone
who also has 150 friends. The numbers of people involved are beyond our
imagination.

Q: In terms of bullying, what can a parent tell a child
about responsible computer use?

A: The larger issue is the parent-child dialogue that seems
not to be happening. Parents need to talk to their children earlier and they
also need to listen to their children. I don’t think you can suddenly talk
about being a responsible computer user at age 14 if there’s been a lack of
communication since birth. You have to have that relationship established. Some
of these behaviors indicate to me a lack of values. I think that the
conversation about invading someone’s space isn’t just related to computers,
it’s related to other things: how people talk to each other and the lack of
civility in our society. We can have short-term computer conversations with our
children, but it’s more about developing a relationship. Once you have that
relationship, kids will listen.

There’s nothing wrong with supervising a child. We give kids
keys to a car but we give them lessons on how to drive. We give them a computer
and say, “Have Fun.” We forget that transition from games to Facebook, and maybe
to pornography. I don’t think we can have one conversation about computers. It
has to be ongoing.